


Haunted

by Saetha



Category: Assassin's Creed - All Media Types
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Angst, Character Death, Deliberate Badfic, Ghosts, Haunting, Horror, Hurt No Comfort, M/M, Shay sees dead people, also my own brand of black as fuck humour, no happy ending
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-21
Updated: 2018-10-21
Packaged: 2019-08-05 09:05:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16364942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saetha/pseuds/Saetha
Summary: “Perhaps they will have vanished once daylight joins us again.”“Perhaps.” Shay doesn’t bother to add that for every corpse that disappears another one usually takes its place. He is never truly alone anymore. He hasn’t been since Lisbon.*Rogue/Shaytham AU in which Shay is haunted by the dead every waking moment. It does not end well.





	Haunted

**Author's Note:**

> THIS IS NOT IN ANY WAY, SHAPE, OR FORM A HAPPY FIC. Also heed the warnings for alcoholism and character death. It's not pretty. 
> 
> Horror was my first love and still is; and oh, do I miss writing horror fics. I'm not having the easiest of times at the moment so the desire to write horror mixed with the desire to write some good old 'everyone dies' badfic. I apologise. (There are happier things I am working on right now - so please, please, please feel free to skip this one if you aren't in the right state of mind. Take care of yourselves my lovelies <3)
> 
>  
> 
> [Suggested Soundtrack](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wrq84yClS1E)

**_Haunted_ **

He can see them wherever he goes.

Shay thinks they are figments of his imagination at first – the woman standing in the corner of the store, grey and cold, her eyes following him through the room as he buys supplies. She looks similar to the woman he killed the week before, but he cannot be sure.

The little boy, however, who keeps following him along the shore of the Hudson, he _does_ know – Gavin, who drowned when they were six and playing in the trees by the stream. He leaves a trail of water on the pavement as he walks behind Shay, no words on his grey tongue but a piercing stare coming from his flat eyes.

They appear only occasionally, one or two at once at most, watching him but never approaching, never speaking. Some of those he kills join them, some not. He cannot find a pattern.

Then Lisbon happens.

The dead crowd in the room when he screams at Achilles, who doesn’t know why Shay is waving his arms, pointing at the corpses surrounding them. Innocents, all of them, an old grandmother next to a father holding a babe barely a few months old. All dead, all colourless, all because of _him_. They follow as he runs away from those he used to think of as his family and are the last thing he sees as he falls and falls and falls before the world turns black.

*

“Shay?”

Shay blinks the sleep from his eyes and mumbles something unintelligible. He is surrounded by warmth on all sides, his chest nestled comfortably against someone’s back, heart beating at a reassuringly normal rate after the chase with Hope two days ago. It takes a moment for him to fully return to reality and remember that he is in bed with Haytham. A very awake Haytham, in fact, who shifts slightly when he’s aware that Shay’s woken up.

“Shay,” Haytham says again. It’s the middle of the night, the darkness a comforting blanket wrapped around them. Shay doesn’t open his eyes, doesn’t want to see whether the dead are hiding in the shadows of the room as they do so often. It’s hard enough to forget during sex (being watched by a 6-year-old’s corpse when you’re in the process of getting buggered by the Grandmaster of your Order is certainly _not_ helping the mood), he doesn’t want to be reminded of that unique curse of his when he’s still half in the embrace of sleep.

“Mhm,” he grumbles, moving closer to Haytham. He is warm and solid and reassuringly alive, everything that the dead haunting him are not.

“Did you lock the door when you came into the room earlier?” Haytham asks, very quietly. Something in his voice makes alarm bells ring inside Shay’s mind, and he laboriously opens his eyes and blinks. As he shifts, his arm collides with Haytham’s hand and he shrinks back. Haytham’s fingers are cold as ice.

“I did,” he murmurs. He almost jumps back when he opens his eyes. Haytham must’ve lit a candle earlier, wanting to see whatever it was that woke him up.

Hope is standing right next to him.

There are shadows behind her, no doubt from the many deaths that have paved Shay’s path through life, but Hope is as close as any of the dead have ever gotten, standing right next to their bed. If Shay reached out past Haytham, he could probably touch her. Not that he wants to, not in this way at least. The memory of her skin on his before her hand fell away is still set in what feels like fire on his cheek. Like all the others, she is saying nothing, just looks down at him with grey and empty eyes.

“Can you see something?” Haytham asks, clearly having noticed Shay flinching back.

“Can you?” Shay replies, very carefully.

“I thought I saw something earlier.” Haytham shivers, pulls up the blanket a bit higher. It almost touches Hope and for a moment, Shay wonders if it would make her go away. “It feels like we’re…being watched. I would have guaranteed that no assassins could have made their way in here without me noticing, but…”

Haytham’s voice trails off as he stares intently at the place where Hope is standing. Shay doesn’t know what possess him to say the next words. Maybe it’s the otherworldliness of the night around him, the aftereffects of Hope’s death still lingering, or simply the steady presence of Haytham that makes him feel safe for the first time in many, many years.

“Can you see her?” he whispers, swallowing when the words have left his tongue.

“’ _Her_ ’?”

“Hope. She’s standing right next to you.” Shay is proud that his voice is trembling only barely.

“Shay, if this is some sort of twisted joke-“

“No.” Shay grasps Haytham’s hand and feels just how cold his skin truly is. “She’s right here. They’ve…” He takes a deep breath. Never before has he told anyone about this. “They’ve always been there. My entire life. All the dead.”

There is nothing but silence from Haytham which is both better and worse than what Shay hoped for. Haytham’s fingers twitch and only then does Shay notice how tightly he is grabbing his hand. His fingernails have left grooves in Haytham’s skin.

“Always?” Haytham asks, very softly.

“Yes.” Shay swallows. “It…it got a lot worse after Lisbon.”

“Is there anything I could do to make them leave?” Haytham inquires, still in the same quiet voice.

“No, usually…they disappear on their own after a while. When I don’t pay attention to them.” Shay’s eyes are still glued to Hope’s form. Never has one of the corpses been so close. If he averts his eyes, will it harm Haytham? Or him? Is it even capable of harming the living?

“Then we should go back to sleep.” Haytham says firmly. “Perhaps they will have vanished once daylight joins us again.”

“Perhaps.” Shay doesn’t bother to add that for every corpse that disappears another one usually takes its place. He is never truly alone anymore. He hasn’t been since Lisbon.

Haytham still hasn’t let go of his hand and Shay wraps his fingers around Haytham’s, squeezing tightly.

“They have never harmed you, have they?” Haytham asks.

“No,” Shay murmurs. “Not until today.”

“Then they won’t do so tonight. Besides,” Shay can hear the smile flicker over Haytham’s lips more than he can see it. “It is my body between you and them. They will have to go through me first.”

“I’m not sure this is much comfort.”

“Do you think I would let myself be killed so easily?” Haytham says. Under normal circumstances this would’ve drawn a laugh out of Shay, but now all he can feel is the cold dread creeping up inside him at the mere thought. Instead of an answer he scoots closer to Haytham, feels the reassuring warmth of his body so beautifully and strongly alive next to him.

“Promise me you’ll never join them, Haytham. _Promise me_ ,” he whispers, his nails digging into Haytham’s skin.

“Of course I never will.” Haytham sounds so certain, so self-assured that Shay lets himself believe the lie for a moment.

“Good.”

They lie silent for a while, unable to sleep. The dead don’t move; it’s as if they are waiting for something but Shay doesn’t know what it is. They always seem to be waiting.

“Have you ever seen a man in his thirties? Bald, a hard face that softened around his eyes. Someone you might not know.” Haytham shifts and Shay can only begin to grasp how much strength it took him to ask this question. “His name…was Holden.”

“No,” he says softly. “I only see those I killed or who were dear to my heart. I’m sorry, Haytham.” Shay doesn’t tell him that, even if he would have been able to see this man, who obviously meant something to Haytham, it would hardly be the same man he had known.

Haytham’s disappointment is palpable in the air for a moment before he catches himself again.

“You don’t have to apologise,” he tells Shay. “It was just a thought.”

*

And then Haytham is gone, and what Shay had prayed for never to happen does, of course, come true. Haytham’s ghost joins the rows of the silent dead one day when Shay is steering the _Morrigan_. The blood from his throat is the only vivid thing about him as he stands close to him, gaze wordless and accusing. _Why weren’t you there?_ his eyes ask, over and over again.

“You sent me away!” Shay screams one night, a bottle following his words and splintering into a thousand shards on his cabin’s wall. “You sent me away. You wanted me _gone_. And then you _went_ and _died all on your own_ and I-“

There is blood on his fingers from picking up the broken glass and it mixes with the tears from his eyes. Broken, broken, broken. There is no way he can put the world together again, not with these hands, not after this. He drinks until the world around him is blurry, and Gist has to drag him to bed almost every night. Drinks to fill up the void inside him that has been there ever since his father died and only deepened with every death. Drinks to preserve the past, forget the present and not have to face the future.

The dead keep watching and there is no comfort in the cold embrace of their presence.

*

He throws himself into fights. No brawl is too small, no weapon to insufficient, no reason too unimportant. He fights until his knuckles bleed and his body is bruised, fights with sword and dagger, with his guns and bare fists until his days are a rush of blood, salt and drink.

None of it helps.

None of it banishes the eyes of the dead from piercing his skin, or the deathly stillness that embraces him at every waking moment that he is alone. Shay goes to Haytham’s grave and screams at him as his shape appears beside it; goes to Hope’s and Liam’s graves, too, asking them why they didn’t kill him and ended it so much sooner. They never reply.

It is a bullet that finds him in the end, lodging itself neatly in his lung between two ribs. Shay is thrown backwards by the impact, somehow manages to bury his dagger in his opponent’s heart as they follow, before stumbling against the wall. His chest is on fire with tendrils of burning ice, sapping all strength from his limbs. He presses a hand against it but already knows what he will find without looking at the blood glistening on his gloves.

Breathing suddenly seems more effort than it is worth, and he knows he’s dying.

There is no poetry to his death, no joyous reunion with lost lovers awaiting. Haytham’s grave is far; all there is here is a dirty back alley with a single gnarled tree. Shay drags himself towards it and slumps down at its foot. He coughs, but no air goes through his lungs; a spray of red is all there is, its lively colour a last splash of bitter irony on the ground.

Drowning in your own blood is a miserable death and it takes too long for his liking; he would have preferred a sword into the chest or a blade across the throat, neat and quick, like he tried to give to all his adversaries. The blood gurgles in his chest, each attempted breath bringing less air into his lungs as they slowly fill up with fluid. They rattle inside him, these breaths, knock around his ribcage as if wanting to break free.  

The dead appear before him one by one as his sight blurs. Women, children, men, people who he has loved, has murdered or been witness to their deaths – all come to watch him die. Haytham is the last. There is no mercy in his eyes, no softening of his stern gaze. As always, Shay wonders whether it is the real Haytham or just an apparition made from evil.

It does not matter.

He is dimly aware that his hands are grasping at thin air, his body fighting one last useless fight against the inevitable. Death is not a soft embrace that draws him in slowly, but a violent scrabbling of fingernails on dirt, the feeling of drowning without a chance to reach the surface, caught in a stream of regrets and loneliness. With his last thoughts, Shay wonders if Haytham felt the same.

As he dies, the ghosts speak for the first time. They’ve been waiting so long.

“Welcome.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> \- Those who are marked for death might see the dead for just a moment.  
> \- I spent several days debating whether the last word was going to be 'Welcome' or 'Finally'.


End file.
